Grin and snap it

Face recognition is all the rage these days in digital cameras, but Sony appeared to have taken the technology to the next level with its "smile shutter." The technology is supposed to detect when someone is smiling in a scene and automatically snap a photo of them. When I heard about the feature, I confess I was skeptical. Nevertheless, it tickled my curiosity. While I haven't been able to get my hands on a Sony model, like the DSC-T200, with the feature, Ed Baig over at USA Today has and wrote about it today.

"Smile shutter worked but not perfectly," he scribbles. "To be sure, I captured a lot of handsome smiles. But the camera missed a number of smiles, too, or took a picture when the subject wasn't fully in the frame."

Like many a novelty, smile shutter's luster may tarnish quickly.

"More often than not, I'd recommend exiting the smile shutter scene mode altogether," Baig noted. "That's because whenever the smiley icon appears in the LCD, you won't be able to manually take a picture by pressing the shutter button. I missed out on a few promising family pictures by not changing the scene mode quickly enough."